Press Release
September 2, 2008

Full attention to climate change imperative -- Loren

"The Philippines is one of the countries most vulnerable to extreme weather shifts."

Senator Loren Legarda made the statement yesterday as she cautioned her peers in the Senate on the urgent need to pass the needed measure to mitigate the effects of climate change.

"There is no time more ideal than this to ask this chamber to pass with urgency and unanimity the committee report that seeks to strengthen our country's resolve to address climate change," Legarda said in her sponsorship speech before the Senate sub-Committee on Climate Change.

"Because the Philippines is on the Axis of Most Ecologically Challenged, a mere one meter rise in sea level which is a certainty unless climate change is reversed, will submerge 700 million square meters of land in 64 of our 80 provinces, and that the 20 most vulnerable provinces will likely disappear from the map," she said.

Legarda batted for the creation of the Climate Change Commission which she said will be the state agency solely dedicated to reversing climate change and an agency fully engaged in climate change adaptation and mitigating work.

"The commission will take care of the work of helping save this part of our planet," said Legarda in her proposed Climate Change Act of 2008.

"The climate Change Commission sums up the country's great resolve to be part of the global effort to reverse the biggest single threat to the survival of humankind," she said.

Legarda noted that a report released on Feb 2, 2008 by the Intergovernmental Panel revealed that "climate change was unequivocal and that there was evidence on the table attributable to human activities as responsible for global warming.

"By passing the law, we become part of the broader community that has declared war on the curse of spheres, the greenhouse gases."

Legarda said that the country will have to get its citizens - especially the farmers, fisherfolks, upland dwellers and urban squatters - prepared, owing to the manifold problems facing the archipelago due to weather shifts that are expected to be always toward the extreme.

"In the Philippine context, it is the poorest of the poor who are the most vulnerable to the savagery of disasters, hence it is a must for us to devise ways to prepare them for the impact of climate change," she pointed out.

Legarda said this can be done by way of mainstreaming climate change in various phases of policy formulation, development plans, poverty reduction strategies and other development tools and techniques by all agencies and instrumentalities of the government.

"According to IPCC, seas will continue to rise. Temperatures will trend upward. Weather patters will be generally weird, extreme and erratic," she said.

"Climate change has the tendency to have domino effects on us, hence it is time we took adaptation efforts to bring sweeping and across-the-board relief to humans and all life forms on earth," she added.

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